Historical language survey

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

Sean Kelly wrote:

> kris wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> Don Clugston wrote:
>>>
>>>> Just Pascal, and I never liked it.
>>>> <rant> It seemed to go out of its way to make pointers difficult to
>>>> understand. Plus, the first line of code was the "program" statement,
>>>> which didn't actually do anything, and the last was an almost
>>>> invisible fullstop. This was supposed to be a good teaching language?
>>>> </rant>
>>>
>>>
>>> I liked Pascal until I tried to write useful programs in it (this was
>>> with Pascal implemented according to Wirth's book). It seems I spent
>>> all my development time fighting the compiler. The language semantics
>>> locked everything up so tight there was no way to get things done.
>>>
>>> Then I read K+R, and it was like the light coming on. The language let
>>> me do what I want (casting is the magic ingredient). Despite using
>>> early very buggy C compilers, I spent my time working on my algorithms
>>> rather than fighting the compiler.
>>>
>>> Pascal vendors noticed the exodus to C, and added a whole boatload of
>>> C-like extensions to Pascal to make it a usable. By then, though, it
>>> was too late to interest me; I never looked at Pascal again. (The
>>> other problem with all those extensions is every vendor did them
>>> differently, making Pascal probably the most non-portable language in
>>> existence because you *had* to use the extensions.)
>>>
>> 
>> Eh? We're talking about the language according the Wirth here (as Walter
>> notes vis-a-vis Wirth's book). Somebody here ought to note that Pascal
>> was designed *solely* as an educational tool, for /teaching structured
>> programming/ ... the syntax and design was never intended as a solution
>> for general-purpose systems programming. It's silly to compare it to C
> 
> Yup.  And for that I think it was well-designed.  The syntax is clear
> and free of arcane symbology, and irritating enough to use for real work
> that students are well inclined to move on when they learn a more
> professional language ;-)  The pointer syntax in Pascal drives me
> absolutely insane.
> 
>> If you want to talk about languages intended for systems-programming,
>> perhaps you should compare to Modula-2 and Modula-3 instead. Now there's
>> a great language that missed its "market window" and/or opportunity.
>> 
>> Interesting to note that D is basically a Modula-3 clone, using C-like
>> syntax instead and adding some more op-overloading. Perhaps D could
>> adopt the more advanced 'import' capabilities from Modula-3 also? Back
>> in the dark ages, they understood such things rather well ... the design
>> in Modula-3 allows one to extend original, imported modules without fear
>> of breaking the code that imports them. What a concept <g>
> 
> Not to derail the topic, but I'm beginning to feel that the current
> symbol lookup mechanism in conjunction with visibility modifiers does a
> terrible job at separating interface from implementation.  As D is a
> module-based language, I firmly believe that I should not want to adopt
> an C/C++ style include model simply to make my private global symbols
> actually private.  I'd be interesting to see how Modula handled the
> minutiae of importing and symbol lookup.
> 
> 
> Sean

Well, since a whole lot is broken in this regard already (possibly not so
much with modules as with objects though), I think a whole lot should be
rethought and preferably in conjunction with other related features such
that the functionality is complete, functional, easy and orthogonal (no
less :) ).

-- 
Lars Ivar Igesund
blog at http://larsivi.net
DSource & #D: larsivi